The Reinvention of the Guitar That Defined Rock ’n’ Roll

You might not know that Leo Fender—a radio and electronics repairman who never played guitar—created it. You might not know that it’s 67 years old and exists in the same fundamental state now as it did in 1950. You might not know that it produces a spectrum of magical sounds that have likely defined your formative listening experiences, from a harsh biting twang to a mellow, round-around-the-edges toke. You might not know the name, but you know the shape; you know the look: It’s Bruce Springsteen on the cover of Born to Run; it’s PJ Harvey playing a black model while wearing a black bikini and little else, and it’s Chrissie Hynde playing pretty much anything. “If someone was asked to draw an electric guitar from memory, they’d draw a Fender Telecaster,” says the company’s senior vice president for products, Justin Norvell.

Created to be an affordable, durable guitar with interchangeable and replaceable parts, the Telecaster belongs to that rare cabal of objects that is essentially unimprovable, with a fiercely loyal clientele that takes any attempt to mess with their baby—to, say, produce a model with something so earth-shatteringly radical as a different screw holding the faceplate to the guitar’s body—as an act of treason. “The design challenge,” says Norvell, “is to find a way to color inside the lines—to evolve something while holding dear what people love about it.” All of which makes the company’s recent decision to scrap their previous high-end line of guitars (Telecasters, yes, but also Stratocasters, Jaguars, and Jazzmasters) and replace it with a new series called American Professional seem positively insane. Full disclosure: I learned to play on a Tele, and, in a moment of idiocy, thought I was trading up when I cashed it in a few years later for a fancy acoustic guitar. I was, of course, painfully wrong. But then I had the chance to actually play one of the new models.

I’ll spare you the extravagant geeking out about their vintage-like tone, the slightly higher frets that make the guitar easier to play, the ever-so-slightly more substantial neck that lends a solidity and sustain to everything. Suffice to say that the Tele felt at once familiar and slightly different.

Those slight differences, in the past, have spurred everything from arguments to insults to fistfights and flame wars: “On guitars like this, every screw, every location of every knob, is viewed by many as holy,” Norvell says. “And if you’ve put 10,000 hours into playing this guitar [full disclosure: I haven’t], you notice these things. I was just with Ed O’Brien from Radiohead, and he was feeling out two different necks and said, “This one’s bigger.” We measured it—and it was 15/1000th of an inch bigger than the other one.”

In addition to the elegant evolution in specs, shapes, electronics, and materials, there’s a host of new colorways, along with a return of some sorely missed favorites, prominent among them butterscotch blonde, which restores a kind of seventies flourish to the line redolent of Keith Richards’s “Micawber” Tele—gifted to him by Eric Clapton—on which Richards invented licks for “Brown Sugar,” “Under My Thumb,” and much of the rest of the Stones’ classic canon.

Leo Fender famously said that if he had a hundred dollars to make a guitar, he’d spend $99 making it work and one dollar making it pretty. Thankfully, that sentiment’s been given an upgrade as well.